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The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: a Cross-Cultural Perspective

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The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: a Cross-Cultural Perspective Psychologia, 2005, 48, 225–240 THE EMOTIONS OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS: A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE David KONSTAN1) 1)Brown University, U.S.A. This paper presents a survey of the emotions of the ancient Greeks, as defined and illustrated by Aristotle, and offers a systematic comparison with emotions as conceived today. The object is to exhibit the differences between the ancient and modern classifications, and to indicate some areas where the classical interpretation can shed light on contemporary issues in the psychology of the emotions. Key words: emotion, Greece, comparative psychology, social constructionism That there are broad similarities in the range and nature of emotions across cultures is clear enough; equally certain is the fact that particular terms for emotions in one culture do not necessarily map exactly onto those in another. What is more, the differences may be systematic, in the sense that, taken together, both the inventory of basic emotion terms in a culture, and the specific character of the several emotions included, may reveal a coherent structure of feeling that differs in determinate ways from that of other cultures (for cross-cultural approaches to the emotions, see Abu-Lughod, 1999; Casimire & Schnegg, 2003; Lutz, 1988). Finally, the entire system may be seen to bear a relationship to values and beliefs within the culture at large, which is in turn distinctive in respect to that of other societies. THEORETICAL CONTEXT There is, of course, a school of thought that holds that emotions are universal, in which case cross-cultural comparisons are otiose. Charles Darwin’s last book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872; rev. ed. 1998), related the emotional life of human beings to that of the more primitive species from which mankind had evolved. Darwin supposed that certain expressive features in humans are as innate and universal as snarling is to dogs. So too, the human smile and other expressive behaviors were treated by Darwin as invariants over different populations and cultures: “With all the races of man the expression of good spirits appears to be the same, and is easily recognized” (Darwin, 1998, p. 211). Darwin confirmed his hypotheses by examining descriptions of human responses drawn from different cultures, particularly those that he and his contemporaries regarded as primitive. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David Konstan, Department of Classics, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912-1856, U.S.A. (e-mail: [email protected]). 225 226 KONSTAN Over the past thirty years, Paul Ekman and his associates have continued Darwin’s work, developing experiments designed to demonstrate that the basic emotions are universally recognized from facial expressions, irrespective of differences in language and culture. Ekman has used more refined techniques than Darwin did, taking larger population samples, making the questionnaires more objective, and employing the results of carefully controlled laboratory experiments. Ekman found it practical to reduce Darwin’s large range of emotions to a few basic ones which could be readily discriminated: anger, disgust, sadness, enjoyment, fear and surprise (the two last sometimes conflated into one) are his primary categories, although he suggests as well that contempt and perhaps the complex of shame and guilt have universal expressions (Ekman, 1998, pp. 390–391). Ekman remarks, however, that “Jealousy seems to have no distinctive expression.” The new discipline of evolutionary psychology, also indebted to Darwin, has again assumed that emotions are innate and universal. Both love and jealousy, for example, are identified as basic emotions by David Buss, who affirms that “People in all cultures experience love and have coined specific words for it” (1994, p. 2). Love is interpreted as an element of mating strategies; Buss explains, for example, that “men and elephant seals share a key characteristic: both must compete to attract females” (p. 9). The competition to attract has as its complement the struggle to retain the partner once she (the gender of the pronoun is significant) has been won: “Male sexual jealousy evolved as a psychological strategy to protect men’s certainty of their paternity” (Buss, 2000, p. 16). Buss does not make clear what the evolutionary advantage of such knowledge might be. More importantly, however, Buss’s explanation takes it for granted that jealousy is in fact universal. But just that has to be demonstrated (on the problem of jealousy in ancient Greek culture, see Konstan, 2003a; on jealousy in general, see Farrell, 1989). The linguist Anna Wierzbicka has mounted the most direct and forceful attack on Ekman’s project. Wierzbicka (1999, p. 168) cites Ekman’s claim (1980, pp. 137–138) that “Regardless of the language, of whether the culture is Western or Eastern, industrialized or preliterate, these facial expressions are labelled with the same emotion terms: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise,” and points out that these labels are hardly indifferent to language. As Wierzbicka puts it, Ekman “continues to imply that these ‘discrete phenomena’ can be identified by means of English lexical categories such as‘anger’ or ‘sadness.’ From this perspective, English lexical categories such as ‘sadness’ or ‘anger’ appear to cut nature at its joints ..., whereas the lexical categories of languages like Ifaluk or Pintupi ... can only correspond to ‘blends.’” The result is that Ekman and his colleagues “absolutize the English folk-taxonomy of emotions” (p. 171). No one denies that the human face has a variety of expressions, or that some gestures may have natural limits: one can only raise the corners of the mouth so far in smiling, or depress them so far to cause a frown. There are data to “suggest that even very young infants ... are able to discriminate the features of the face that to an adult denote facial expressions” (Nelson & de Haan, 1997, p. 183; cf. p. 198). But why treat acute gestures as indices of basic or elementary emotions? Extreme cases, as Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (2000, p. 8) EMOTIONS OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS 227 remarks, “are mistakenly perceived to be both typical and frequent because ... they are more noticeable.” Ekman’s Darwinian approach is vulnerable also to the criticism that the information communicated by facial and other gestures is not as consistent as his research method might lead one to believe. Russell (1997, p. 312) observes, for example, that in experiments in which photographs were combined with stories, “In every case, the modal emotion chosen coincided with the prediction based on the situation rather than on the face.” An additional factor is facial mobility. As Bavelas and Chovil (1997, p. 339) point out, “faces in dialogue move rapidly to convey meaning in conjunction with other, simultaneous symbolic acts.” There is ample reason, then, to suppose that even on the terrain of the expression of the emotions, cultural conditioning plays a major role in how they are constructed, experienced, and communicated. Expression, however, is only the final phase of the emotional process. Where cultural variation might be expected to play a larger role is in the stimulus or cause of an emotion, which is evaluated cognitively. Over the past thirty years or so, investigators in several disciplines have increasingly recognized that emotions typically involve a substantial cognitive and evaluative component (see Averill 1980; Frank, 1988; Harré, 1986; Oatley, 1992; Rorty, 1980; Solomon, 1993; on appraisal, Forgas, 2000; Frijda, 1993; Frijda, Manstead, & Bem, 2000; Scherer, Schorr, & Johnstone, 2001). The traditional opposition between reason and emotion is no longer the reigning paradigm in science or philosophy. William Lyons (1980, p. 70), for example, defines an emotion as consisting of cognitive (or perceptual), evaluative, and appetitive elements, and observes that what differentiates one emotion from another is precisely the evaluative part. Some theorists, in fact, have interpreted emotions as nothing more than judgments — albeit judgments of a particular kind, so as to distinguish them from other cognitive activities (Lazarus, 1991, p. 353; Nussbaum, 2001; Solomon, 1993, pp. viii, 125–126). What is more, an emphasis on cognition and appraisal is fully present in ancient Greek accounts of the emotions. As Richard Lazarus, one of the founders of modern appraisal theory, observes (2001, p. 40; cf. Hinton, 1999, p. 6), “those who favor a cognitive-mediational approach must also recognize that Aristotle’s Rhetoric more than two thousand years ago applied this kind of approach to a number of emotions in terms that seem remarkably modern.” Thus, the chasm that seems to divide the cognitivist view and that of the neo- Darwinists may be in large measure a consequence of focusing on distinct moments in the emotional process. ARISTOTLE AND ANCIENT GREEK EMOTIONS The test of a comparative approach to emotion is the extent to which it is helpful in defining the emotional organization of a specific culture, and by doing so helps to shed light on other emotional regimes with which it may be compared. In what follows, I propose to examine a set of emotions that can reasonably be taken to be basic to ancient Greek culture at what many consider its apogee, that is, classical Athens of the fifth and 228 KONSTAN fourth centuries B.C. There is an obvious drawback to undertaking such an investigation: the culture is long since extinct, and there are no native speakers to inform us of the meanings of their emotional vocabulary. There are, in turn, several important advantages, which make the project both feasible and informative. First, the Greeks left a rich written literature, including fiction, courtroom speeches, historical accounts, and poetry, which permits us to see their emotional repertoire in action. Second, and more relevant to the present study, they also produced careful definitions and descriptions of the basic emotions, of which the most extensive and rigorous for the epoch under consideration is that of Aristotle, no mean thinker.
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